Surely this audience doesn't need another reason to hang their head low these days. We fight and fight and things deteriorate. Nevertheless I feel compelled to share with you what the world looks like from Berlin, where as the dutiful employee at a powerful American NGO, I have witnessed America' soft power in Europe evaporate in the period of roughly four months.

It began with Katrina. It continues with al-Masri (still a burgeoning scandal in Germany for those who have forgotten about it back home). And now this spying nonsense. Sure, we'll continue to score our high-level meetings with Merkel and Steinmeier, and we'll get our chance to lobby them for our niche cause. But it's our niche cause that gives us the access, otherwise we wouldn't have a prayer meeting with these folks. The truth of it is, what I see in the eyes of our European partners is something much more humiliating than I could have imagined: pity. They know we didn't have anything to do with this crap. And they still meet with us anyway. But whatever moral authority our organization carried with it on the basis of being American is completely gone. America is now a nation well beyond law, abusive of its own citizens, indifferent to mass suffering, and rolling along without any regard for, well, anything.

Yeah, we'll continue to meet with the politicos here, but we do it all while trying to avoid talking about where our organization is from and how it derives its wealth. We do it ashamed, and they pity us.

I wish I could be less circumspect. In fact, I probably could be, but I see no reason why I would jeopardize my own position and that of my organization by being unnecessarily candid in a blog post. But it's sad here. Very sad. They don't want it any more than we do, but we all know and it goes unspoken. The US has nearly exhausted its soft power in Europe. (Some may argue that Merkel is pro-American, but let's keep in mind she only represents 32 percent of Germany. The rest of the German political class looks at us like we're abused and fearful wives held at the nape by a beast of a husband.)